When is a job not a job?

IS MICHAEL STEELE NUTS?   The recently ordained Republican chairman had me running to volumes of dictionaries with his insistence that a government job is not a job but  "work".   I had long believed - and still do - that anybody on a payroll at public expense may be considered  one who is employed by the government, i.e. a job.   That would include safety forces in my town, school teachers, college professors,  the important guys who plow and salt the streets in my neighborhood after a snowstorm - even school crossing guards and cafeteria cooks.  Steele blitzed the language in the presence of ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who seemed as confused as I am about the isolation of a job from "work". It's a curious way of saying things  because one of Steele's first jobs (work?) as chairman will be to clear up charges that his political campaign in 2006 paid his sister $37,000 for catering services that her company never performed.